T. Boyle - T. C. Boyle Stories

This I do know: they drink wine. I have been out back, at night, walking my dog, and I have seen the discarded bottles: chablis, liebfraumilch, claret, mountain burgundy, Bristol Cream. They eat well too. The garbage is rich with dark exotic coffee grounds and spiced teas, the heads of sole, leaves of artichoke, shells of oyster. There is correspondence in the trash as well. Business things for the most part, but once there was a letter from Grace’s mother in Moscow, Iowa. Some of the women smoke cigars. Others — perhaps the same ones — drive motorcycles. I watched two of them stutter up on a Triumph 750. In leathers. They walked like meatpackers, heavy, shoulders back, hips tight. Up the steps of the front porch, through the curtained double doors, and in. The doors closed like eyes in mascara.

There is more. Grace, for instance. I know Grace. She is tall, six three or four I would guess, thin and slightly stooped, her shoulders rounded like a question mark. Midthirties. Not married. She walks her square-headed cat on a leash, an advocate of women’s rights. Rubie I have spoken with. If Grace is austere, a cactus tall and thorny, Rubie is lush, a spreading peony. She is a dancer. Five feet tall, ninety pounds, twenty-four years old. Facts. She told me one afternoon, months ago, in a bar. I was sitting at a table, alone, reading, a glass of beer sizzling in the sunlight through the window. Her arms and shoulders were bare, the thin straps of her dancer’s tights, blue jeans. She was twirling, on point, between groups of people, her laughter like a honky-tonk piano. She came up from behind, ran her finger along the length of my nose, called it elegant. Her own nose was a pug nose. We talked. She struck poses, spoke of her body and the rigors of dancing, showed me the hard muscle of her arms. The sun slanted through the high windows and lit her hair. She did not ask about my life, about the book I was reading, about how I make a living. She did not sit down. When she swept away in a series of glissades, her arms poised, I ordered another beer. She wouldn’t know me on the street.

The women’s restaurant fronts a street that must have been a main thoroughfare fifty years ago. It comprises the whole of an old mansion, newly painted and shuttered. There is a fence, a gate, a tree, a patch of lawn. Gargoyles. The mayor may once have lived there. On either side blocks of two-story brick buildings stretch to the street corners like ridges of glacial detritus. Apartments above, storefronts below: a used clothing store, an organic merchant, a candle shop. Across the street, incongruous, is a bar that features a picture window and topless dancers. From behind this window, washed in shadow, I reconnoiter the women’s restaurant.

I have watched women of every stripe pass through those curtained front doors: washerwomen, schoolmarms, gymnasts, waitresses, Avon ladies, Scout leaders, meter maids, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, spinsters, widows, dykes, gay divorcees, the fat, the lean, the wrinkled, the bald, the sagging, the firm, women in uniform, women in scarves and bib overalls, women in stockings, skirts, and furs, the towering Grace, the flowing Rubie, a nun, a girl with a plastic leg — and yes, even the topless dancers. There is something disturbing about this gathering of women, this classless convocation, this gynecomorphous melting pot. I think of Lysistrata, Gertrude Stein, Carry Nation.

My eyes and ears are open. Still, what I have come to know of Grace & Ruble’s is what any interested observer might know. I hunger for an initiate’s knowledge.

II

I have made my first attempt to crack the women’s restaurant.

The attempt was repulsed.

I was sitting at the picture window of the topless bar, chain-drinking tequila and tonic, watching the front porch of Grace & Rubie’s, the bloom of potted flowers, the promise of the curtained doors, and women, schools of them, electric with color, slamming car doors, dismounting from bicycles, motorcycles, trotting up the steps, in and out, tropical fish behind a spotted pane of glass. The sun was drifting toward the horizon, dipping behind the twin chimneys, spooning honey over the roof, the soft light blurring edges and corners, smoothing back the sneers of the gargoyles. It was then that I spotted Rubie. Her walk fluid and unperturbed as a drifting skater. There was another girl with her, an oriental girl. Black hair like a coat. I watched the door gape and then swallow them. Then I stood, put some money in my pocket, left some on the table, and stepped out into the street.

It was warm. The tree was budding. The sun had dropped a notch and the house flooded the street with shadow. I swam toward it, blood beating quick, stopped at the gate to look both ways, pushed through and mounted the steps. Then made my first mistake. I knocked. Knocked. Who knocks at the door of a restaurant? No one answered. I could hear music through the door. Electric jazz. I peered through the oval windows set in the door and saw that the curtains were very thick indeed. I felt uneasy. Knocked again.

After an interval Grace opened the door. Her expression was puzzled. “Yes?” she said.

I was looking beyond her, feeling the pulse of the music, aware of a certain indistinct movement in the background, concentrating on the colors, plants, polished woodwork. Underwater. Chagall.

“Can I help you?”

“Yes, you can,” I said. “I’d like — ah — a cup of coffee for starters, and I’d like to see the menu. And your wine list.”

“I’m very sorry,” Grace said. “But this is a women’s restaurant.”

III

A women’s restaurant. The concept inflames me. There are times, at home, fish poached, pots scrubbed, my mind gone blank, when suddenly it begins to rise in my consciousness, a sunken log heaving to the surface. A women’s restaurant. The injustice of it, the snobbery, the savory dark mothering mystery: what do they do in there?

I picture them, Rubie, Grace, the oriental girl, the nun, the girl with one leg, all of them — picture them sipping, slouching, dandling sandals from their great toes (a mental peep beneath the skirts). I see them dropping the coils of their hair, unfastening their brassieres, rubbing the makeup from their faces. They are soft, heavy, glowing with muliebrity. The pregnant ones remove their tentish blouses, pinching shoes, slacks, underwear, and begin a slow primitive shuffle to the African beat of the drums and the cold moon music of the electric piano. The others watch, chanting, an arcane language, a formula, locked in a rhythm and a mystery that soar grinning above all things male, dark and fertile as the earth.

Or perhaps they’re shooting pool in the paneled back room, cigars smoking, brandy in snifters, eyes intense, their breasts pulled toward the earth, the slick cue sticks easing through the dark arches of their fingers, stuffed birds on the walls, the glossy balls clacking, riding down the black pockets like burrowing things darting for holes in the ground …

IV

Last night there was a fog, milk in an atomizer. The streets steamed. Turner, I thought. Fellini. Jack the Ripper. The dog led me to the fence outside the women’s restaurant, where he paused to sniff and balance on three legs. The house was a bank of shadow, dark in a negligee of moonlit mist. Fascinating, enigmatic, compelling as a white whale. Grace’s VW hunched at the curb behind me, the moon sat over the peaked roof cold as a stone, my finger was on the gate. The gate was latched. I walked on, then walked back. Tied the dog to one of the pickets, reached through to unlatch the gate, and stepped into the front yard at Grace & Rubie’s for the second time.

This time I did not knock.

Instead I slipped up to a window and peered through a crack in the curtains. It was black as the inside of a closet. On an impulse I tried the window. It was locked. At that moment a car turned into the street, tires chirping, engine revving, the headlights like hounds of heaven. Rubie’s Fiat.